Leigh Blackall

So, 1 month in and where am I up to with the National Institute of Sport Studies, The Faculty of Health and the University of Canberra generally?

What's expected

Social media presence. The UCNISS wants to be leading sport studies institution through the use of open and networked research, teaching and learning. An invitation has been given to UCNISS staff then to develop online presence and adopt open and networked practices. To this end I am brought in to advise and develop the capability of staff who are interested in such an approach, and work closely with them to develop critical appreciation and skills in the use of the Internet and social media to achieve this goal.

The website. While 80% of my time is allocated to working with the UCNISS staff, 20% is to address the short comings of the Faculty of Health's web pages. The expectation is that the web pages will be updated and made more usable as soon as possible, and in time for our peak student enrolment season.

What I have done so far

Investigating existing services. For the first few weeks, I investigated the functionality of the services provided by the University of Canberra, and considered how they could be incorporated into the effort to establish online presence for the UCNISS staff. I looked at the following services:

1. Moodle
2. UCSpaces
3. Yammer
4. The UC Website
5. The NISS.org Wordpress install
6. UC's Wifi provision
7. I am waiting to see the outcome of a lecture recording facility being considered

I was primarily looking for simple and intuitive two way integration between these services and the established popular media platforms that we would likely use:

1. Blogger
2. Twitter
3. Delicious
4. Wikipedia, books and versity
5. Youtube
6. Slideshare
7. Ustream
8. Smartphones

Moodle
The UC Moodle set up is one of the better setups I have seen. Users have the option to make their courses open access, including deep linking into the course itself from outside the network. Also, I was able to embed several forms of RSS fed media into a Moodle course, delivering a relatively seamless relationship to outside media platforms. Here is an example course I set up to automatically update based on my activities in the social media platforms outside moodle. Recently, I am told, Moodle now has the ability to capture a blog post on Blogger and update the blog instance for that user inside Moodle. Unfortunately the RSS feed coming out of Moodle is difficult to use, the URLs for the courses are not easily memorised, and Google search does not effectively locate pages inside the Moodle course.

UCSpace
UCSpace is run on Confluence, a widely recognised content management system based around the wiki and social networking software. It was set up to offer both an open and closed social networking space for UC staff (and students?) It appears to have received very little support or uptake. I found it too difficult to use and graphically unappealing. I tried to set it so that this blog would automatically update my blog in UCSpace, but I couldn't work it out. I tried to manage the RSS feeds coming out of UCspace, but it proved difficult to find the right feed, and the one I thought was right, appears to not be updating properly. I posted an initial plan for updating the Health website (and copy pasted it to my blog) but recieved little constructive feedback compared to the network I have established outside UCspaces. From what I can tell, UCsMoodle has a better chance of becoming the internal space that UCspace was intended for. To my thinking, both are unnecessarily limiting in that they encourage introverted thinking on the part of UC staff, and so probably facilitates poor understanding of the popular social media platforms.

Yammer
Yammer is an excellent micro blogging platform, and if I could, I would try and convert all the Twitter users to it. But again my established network is on Twitter and to a smaller degree a UC network is in Yammer. It is possible to feed Tweets into Yammer via the #yam tag, but it is not possible to reply to these tweets from inside Yammer. Observing the UC Yammer network for a month now, I believe that opportunities are missed by not using Twitter, and that Yammer facilitates an introversion again. It is important to strengthen networks inside one's organisation, but I hope to play a role in drawing more of my colleagues out onto Twitter, and so help establish #UC etc as relating to the University of Canberra, and establishing wider networks relating to our UC issues and discussions.

The UC Website
I have been totally bewildered at the difficulty in using the UC Website content management system. Apparently popular in the Australian public service sector, MySourceMatrix, or at least the UC instance of it, is incredibly inefficient to use, often crashing my browser, and requiring several tens of clicks and processes just to complete a simple task like creating or updating a new page. The UC web team have been very helpful however, generously providing their time in getting me confident in the use of the system. It is possible to capture an RSS feed into the site, and I have set up staff profile pages that capture information from their respective blog feeds. It is more difficult than it should be by contemporary CMS standard, but at least their is no official UC policy or procedure preventing such a feature on the website. Given the extreme difficulty in using this system, it is unrealistic to expect academic staff to be able to manage and update pages themselves, rendering the website almost useless for achieving the goal of establishing web presence for UCNISS. Instead, it would be wiser to set up the website to capture activity outside, and to represent a central point for over viewing UCNISS in relation to the Faculty of Health. As for the Faculty pages as a whole, again given the usability issues, there is a risk that I will become the only go-to person for updating the website, but for now it is manageable and complimentary to my learning how to use MySourceMatrix.

The NISS.org Wordpress install
The NISS.org.au domain name was intended for use for UCNISS, but as a colleague recently pointed out, NISS.org is currently operating and risks confusing the web presence, as do a number of other NISS type organisations. Discussion is being had with the likely result being to adopt UCNISS as the name, and change the domain to UCNISS.org. Currently there is a Wordpress install on the domain, administered by an employee at UC. It seems that person is very busy and might not be able to assist too much with the development of the site. My first recommendation would be to install Wordpress Multi User, and set the site to capture RSS feeds from the blogs and channels of the staff that make up UCNISS (rather than have them set up accounts on a central site like UCNISS). This approach will lesson the reliance on a UCNISS site administrator, and encourage UCNISS related content to dispurse over the Internet, helping with search engine optimisation, and developing staff skills in the use of a wider array of tools.

UCs Wifi
UC's Wifi is universally disappointing, and has not been properly resourced or developed to keep up with contemporary expectations. I attended an IT forum in which the IT support staff challenged the perceived expectation of Wifi, citing low usage statistics as a justification for not providing an enhanced Wifi service on campus. From this I surmise that it will be a very long road to getting free and open Wifi on campus, and so my colleagues and I are investigating alternatives, including roaming keys and portable wireless hubs to make our wired network open Wifi in lectures, meetings with guests and conferences. The Teaching and Learning Centre at UC in the meantime, continues to lobby IT for better Wifi support.

Lecture recording
The TLC is reviewing a system called echo360 for use as a lecture recorder. My previews of the system gives me cause for concern. The frame rate and image quality appears poor, the recordings centre around a screen recording positioning the actual lecturer and lecture room as a peripheral aspect to the lecture, the multi media recording (the one that includes an image of the lecturer and the room) does not output in a portable format outside Flash. I could be wrong on these points, but regardless - it seems to me to be another instance of using an expensive system when we have free and ready access to popular systems that will do much the same, and position our lecturers in the market so to speak. Some UCNISS staff for example are quite keen to use Youtube, Slideshare and Ustream to record and broadcast their lectures. I have argued that the money allocated to a lecture recording system would be better spent upgrading the Wifi and providing lecturers with smart phones to carry with them and broadcast lectures, interviews and other situational events through the Wifi to services like Ustream.

Smartphones
I have also spent the month using an HTC smart phone with the Android operating system, as well as a Nokia N97 smart phone. The affordability or these phones, along with their functionality could yield interesting uses for staff in UCNISS - such as broadcasting lectures and live events, are integrating their social media webpresence with a mobile device. This might be some way off yet.

This is a diagram for a plan I have been discussing with colleagues for achieving the goal of establishing UCNISS and staff presence on the Internet.


So far I am very encouraged by the enthusiasm and intuitive understanding my colleagues have shown towards this idea. Our conversation is well beyond the basics already and right into the exciting possibilities. 2 staff have lead a charge, having set up blogs and Slideshare accounts each, with one going on to explore Ustream, Youtube, and Twitter. Time does appear to remain an issue for both however, and so far the exploration remains superficial.

My intention is to work closely with these early adopters, and offer as much help for them as they need. I am trusting that that won't turn into me doing the work for them, and that their interest and enthusiasm for how these tools are useful will remain strong and inspired.

My next post will more fully articulate the thinking behind the flows of data, the how's and why's of using a plan like this, and how I am thinking to make this project with UCNISS the topic of a PhD.

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man's copyright, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Steve Forester, in discussion with Minhaaj Rehman and others on the Resist-Copyright list, Nov 2009.

The Peer to Peer University is discussing copyright at the moment, and have invited comment from people who have something to say on the matter. They're looking for "1 pagers" to bring into their meeting for consideration and debate within the P2PU team.

The argument that I am going to try and make is that P2PU should actively resist copyright. So the question should not be which copyright license to use, but how to not use copyright at all?

I've been writing and acting on the topic of copyright in education for 6 years now. A seemingly short time, but pretty much the duration as it applies to copyright in education. Most of that time has been explaining and promoting the use of the Creative Commons Attribution License as the best choice for educational organisations. Not because it "enables" sharing (we shouldn't, and don't need a license to share) but because it was a logical compromise between the prevailing restrictive licenses at the time, and the objective to remove all bureaucratic costs over the free use and reuse of information and expression - especially educative. At that time, educational organisations and their contractors were following the Free Trade lead of corporatisation and privatisation, and at that time corporations and private organisations believed ownership and restricted access to information and media was the only way to protect their "property", competitive edge and/or income. Free software, open source, Wikimedia, OurMedia, Youtube and Google, and Creative Commons was to gradually show otherwise is possible.

The moral and even economic arguments for free and unrestricted information is as old as the Internet itself. The so-called CopyLeft offered a temporary enabler in the face of overwhelming restrictions, while the rest of us slowly came to terms with what new economic models where being made possible. Corey Doctorow took advantage of the Creative Commons star and showed how openness in book authoring is beneficial even to the old models of publishing. Many universities eventually saw the moral and economic advantage of open access to their information. Yochai Benkler academically legitimised what many in the popular sphere had been practicing for years. Google and the social media providers generally, showed that the Gift Economy can be happy bedfellows with the Market Economy.

The point here is not that copyright restricts or enables this new economy, copyright is merely temporary within it. The Gift Economy, Information Economy, free information world, what ever you want to call it, is driven by profound human will and desire, ages old, to know and communicate. This will, combined with digital formats and the Internet, completely decimated business models that relied on the preventative costs of production and distribution, and now they rely on the protectionism of copyright alone. Copyright is merely a nuisance to a truer force for free information, certainly not an enabler.

And so, we wait for groups and organisations to recognise the freedom that individuals enjoy regardless of copyright laws and protectionism. Look to the success-at-the-time of Napster and Pirate Bay for models of such freedom, and learn from their eventual weaknesses. As well, consider corporations like Google who boldly flaunt their disregard for copyright, helping the rest of us to push out and enjoy that freedom. Groups like the Peer to Peer University should join direct and indirect activist such as these and reject copyright as a defining policy over their activities. Their reasoning for such a stance should be abundantly clear by now, none-the-less there will be die hard and wanna be bureaucrats out there who simply cannot envision an operation free of copyright, and so a strong statement, coupled with a defiant stance in the face of what remains of such conservatism is necessary.

P2PU wants to be a network, made up of individual action and responsibility. As such P2PU should not impose a particular copyright policy on these individuals, instead focusing on the facilitation of the free exchange of learning and educational advance. Further, P2PU should not even recognise copyright as a legitimate governing force over the free exchange of learning or educational advance, and so it follows that it will not take action for or against any individual in the network based on copyright.

For some time now I've been talking about this idea on how an organisation should handle video (or all media it produces for that matter), I think I may have blogged it before - I know I tried to use the Heywire 8 meeting as a venue to bring it forward, and I had high hopes that NZ Telecom would show interest, or that Digital NZ would make it possible, but I haven't heard anything back from any of them. Perhaps those secretive Kiwis are forging ahead without me.. just like they did to some poor old Australian with the pavlova.

Recently my colleagues as University of Canberra have asked me to write the idea up in a one pager for use in a proposal. If you have any pointers on the idea, please comment in a link.

The way we should manage video

Someone wanting to upload a video at UC goes to the UC website and clicks upload. The select the file they wish to upload and then go through an extensive list of servers to send that file to. (UC website, Moodle, National Archives, Youtube, Internet Archive, Blip.tv, Facebook.. add their own server). When they click upload the file is pushed across the selected platform carrying with it a link to UC, and when finished they receive an email with a summary of file locations and embed codes. They use whichever one they like in their own sites, or leave it at that. The point of this is getting content out across the Internet in ways that suite the preferences of both the individual publishers and the viewers, as well as establishing a strong UC presence across popular media platforms. This is also a good form of backup, especially considering the addition of the Internet Archive and the National Archives.

A free web service that does most of this already exists at http://tubemogul.com. The thing that is needed on such a service however, is the ability to add other servers.

Given that most organisations use a Proxy server to manage Internet use, it is possible to use this file distribution idea to manage bandwidth use. For example, if someone on campus requests a file it is delivered from campus servers. If the request is from off campus somewhere, then the file is delivered from off campus servers thus saving UC outgoing and incoming data costs.

Click to Play MP3 (14Meg)

Terry Marler alerts me to an over due milestone report for the Ako Aotearoa project where we are attempting to evaluate the impact of open educational developments at Otago Polytechnic. Up until now, I expected that the my blog postings on the project and the wiki that documents the project, were acting as continuous progress reports. But it turns out that there is a word processor template that needs to be filled in! Blogging is beyond what is required, so this post is for me and you I guess, and I will attempt to squeeze it into the template provided.

Progress so far:

Reports
All reports are categorised and fed through RSS on the tag word project-ako

15 September 2009
Measuring our open education, finishing stage 1: Usage
Reporting initial findings on the costs, savings and gains of using social media platforms. Comments from peers were left, resulting in minor changes to the equations, and a finished stage 1 evaluation published on the project wiki.
16 comments to date from peers.

13 August 2009
Models of open education
Reporting on the talk given in Vancouver for the Open Education 2009 conference. Includes a video recording and key points and links made in the talk:

• 4 stories
• 4 models
• Policy and support
• Questioning

2 comments to date from peers.
17 July 2009
Measuring open education: How we value it?
Reporting on the second meeting with ethnographers being engaged to assist with evaluating the impact open education has on staff values and perceptions of performance. Report includes confirmation of a research plan.
0 comments to date from peers

7 July 2009
Measuring open education
Reporting on research direction after meeting with external and experienced ethnographers.
14 comments to date from peers.

Since the conference, stage 1 of a 2 stage evaluation was completed finding that:

It costs $4000 to train one person how to use social media to source, produce and publish open educational resources for their teaching practice. That person will go on to return $4542 per year worth of brand awareness for their organisation, $1031 per year in quality gains by sampling and reusing free content, and up to $3615 per year worth of savings in infrastructural and support costs by using free media publishing services.

How this approach to teaching practices impacts on senses of job satisfaction, motivation, and perceptions of teaching and learning performance is yet to be determined. We are waiting for reports from an ethnographic study to be conducted by external researchers. We also hope to gain insight into subjective perspectives on the impact the practice has on learning outcomes and satisfaction.

If it is agreed that these returns are tangible and useful, it will be recommended that a committed training regime (one that compensates for teacher time) be implemented, and that incentives and rewards be put in place for teachers that go on to use popular social media for open educational practices.

Click to Play

I attended a forum that is held regularly around Canberra, called Gaggle. It is an edtech forum generally, and I was excited to go, expecting to meet several of the edtech people I have been following for several years. Unfortunately they didn't attend this #gaggle, but I was still interested to see what ANU would bring to the discussion...

Unfortunately I was a little disappointed, leading to some frustration over there being no time allowed for discussion after each 10 minute presentation, seeing me tweet spiky comments and questions instead. Perhaps that lack of discussion is a good thing though.. we have the technology to carry on a discussion here, and maybe the face to face is better used to cover as much ground as possible in terms of ideas and content... I dunno, I tend to think the other way around would be better. Presentations online, face to face for discussion.

One of the presenters, Tom Worthington has been gracious enough to ignore the tone of my tweets and respond to each, at length on his blog. I should have tagged my questions according to the presentations I was referring to though, because not every one was to Tom. My frustration at the time was only added to by the 140 character limits, typing on an android with only one bar of signal and no open wifi in the room. Even more frustrating was the 4-10 seconds for a question or comment after a presentation, just as everyone is told its time to leave.. all of which is hardly conducive to discussion.. especially for someone like me who is yet to develop the virtue of patience.

Tom's come back to my main question:

LB Tweets: What if anyone could pick and chose anything from anywhere to make a degree? Why limit it to institutions?

Tom blogs: You can pick and choose anything for your education. But it may help to have someone help you pick and choose. That is part of what institutions do. They also provide a form of quality control for you, and for others, to say what you studied and what you did with it was worthwhile. This particularly applies to education for professions which effect on people's lives.

Tom's point is one that is often cited to refute Connectivism or networked and open learning, similar in ways that schooling refutes deschooling. That some professions require quantifiable skills and assessment, and that institutions provide that is a fair point in the context of "higher education" becoming more like vocational training, and a point that is exactly what is being challenged. Do the institutions really provide effective guidance and quality, or are they simply enjoying a governed monopoly over the idea? Many parallels have been made here with recent challenges facing newspapers and journalism - one being the institution, the other being the social value it keeps. What happens when that social value is more effectively found (or realised) in places outside that institution?

It would surely be a possible point of agreement that formal education and curriculum does more than simply guide and make quality. There is much more to the formalised learning experience than that. If we then extend that line into questions of what institutions displace in people's learning, and what those institutions might do if faced with evidence that their social value is being met elsewhere, then I think we would be having a discussion on something that is what Gaggle should be about. But this argument perhaps puts me in one historic camp and Tom in another. The argument is impractical to here and now, decades long, with my camp having become absent from most public dialogue within the institutions (Illich, Frier, Holt, McCluhan, Chomsky, and more recently, a medium sized network of blogging educational commentators).

Even in the areas of simple quantifiable education and training, we can find evidence of efficiency gains in self directed and networked learning - largely thanks to recent communications media reawakening old social ideas and the willingness of a % of people to try those ideas again. The values of guidance and quality Tom refers to, is it being diluted by inflated fees, bureaucratic overheads, open educational practices, open courseware, and more broadly - efforts to add value opportunities for learning through social media and connections? If this dilution continues, perhaps the only value left in institutions will be assessment and credentialism, and the learning that credentialasim rewards, finds more opportunities to take place everywhere else but the institutions. The rise in the practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), and Assessment of Prior Learning (APL) for example.

To be honest though, I am relatively inexperienced with the Higher Ed sector, having spent 8 years on the vocational training sector, and a few years in secondary. Even there, are threads of philosophical wonderings about competency based curriculum, assessment, and the wider stuff generalised as critical, ethical, social, creative and analytical learnings. All of it leading to what I think ought to be an identity crisis for institutions, and a massive topic of consideration at forums like Gaggle.

There was one presenter positing these questions at ANU #gaggle, Megan Poore. I would have liked to ask her the nagging question I have inspired by reading Illich. Do the utopian ideas of networked learning and socialism through these new technocratic devices actually displace more people than it empowers? Are we utopians watching that ball?